Compared with New England, the middle region was a rapidly growing
section. The population of New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and
Delaware combined was about two and three-quarter millions in 1820,
and three and two-third millions in 1830. By that date New York
alone balanced all New England in the number of its people. But it
was its western half that permitted this growth of the middle
section. During the decade 1820-1830, New York west of Oneida Lake
increased in population by a percentage more than twice as great,
and by an amount almost as great, as that of the populous eastern
half of the state. By the end of the decade, about one-third of
Pennsylvania's population was found west of her central counties. At
that time New York and Pennsylvania became the most populous states
in the Union. Virginia and Massachusetts, which in 1790 held the
lead, had now fallen to third and eighth place respectively. New
Jersey, meanwhile, lagged far behind, and Delaware's rate of
increase was only five and one-half per cent. In 1829 a member of
the Virginia constitutional convention asked: "Do gentlemen really
believe, that it is owing to any diversity in the principles of the
State Governments of the two states, that New York has advanced to
be the first state in the Union, and that Virginia, from being the
first, is now the third, in wealth and population? Virginia ceded
away her Kentucky, to form a new state; and New York has retained
her Genessee--there lies the whole secret." [Footnote: Va.
Constitutional Convention, Debates (1829-1830), 405.]

In the closing years of the eighteenth century and the first decade
of the nineteenth the New York lands beyond the sources of the
Mohawk had been taken up by a colonization characteristically
western. New England farmers swarmed into the region, hard on the
heels of the retreating Indians. Scarcely more than a decade before